Michelle Kenney - Storm of Ash

We set out again, two hunters from different communities bringing food to share. It was progress, I told myself as a jaybird darted low in front of us, dropping the remainder of its meal onto the forest floor.

In a breath, the jungle melted away, and I was free-falling towards the glass river with its slow snaking arms and muted starlight. My eyes closed briefly and I willed it to consume me, to take me back to oblivion. But the jungle loomed back anyway with its coarse sunlight and unapologetic life. I was conscious of a rush of disappointment, before a cool palm on my cheek. I longed to fold into it, to take the comfort my silent friend offered, but I’d learned the hard way that caring led only to pain.

I quickened my pace. We’d stayed too long today.

‘Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.’

August’s whisper was barely there, but his pain was as clear as a monsoon moon.

I tried to resist the dream but it fought back, tightening its hold, and trapping me inside my own memory. I told myself that I would wake soon, that I should focus on breathing, but each inhalation drew nails over my lungs. Raking in and raking out. Shouldn’t it be easier than this now?

‘The stars incline us … they do not bind us,’ I whispered, a hazy echo of Grandpa’s wisdom reaching through.

August watched me, his silence saying nothing and everything all at once.

‘I am not bound by this,’ I repeated, staring at my aching, blistered fingers as clearly as though we were back there.

I was bluffing though.

We both knew it. It was the thing that always undid me, his unerring ability to read my thoughts, no matter how hard I tried to block him out. I fixed my gaze on the flames, feeling none of their warmth. We’d come so far over the mountains together; and yet the distance was growing.

If August hadn’t gone to Europa, if I hadn’t asked Max to save Aelia, if we hadn’t run after the Prolets, if I’d stayed with Eli …

The charges went on, the guilt was asphyxiating and yet every cell of my disloyal body wanted to steal inside his battle-worn arms. To let him take me far away from the perishing mountains, Isca Pantheon and everything we knew.

I stretched out and let my fingers rest over his as I stared into the dancing flames. I didn’t need to look at him to know the fresh lines the North Mountains had etched in his face. He didn’t need to know how his vulnerability weakened me, and made me remember the first time I saw him look like that back in Aelia’s cave in Isca Prolet. That time.

His fingers closed over mine, and even though it was a dream, I could feel their question as clearly as though he’d whispered the words.

Unus had ventured out for firewood, and was likely to be a while given the sparse mountain shale. And this tiny mountain cave tucked away from the harsh, unforgiving elements had created a brief reprieve none of us had expected. It was precious time together, perhaps the last we would ever have.

Suddenly I felt like the naive girl he’d smuggled into his rooms in Pantheon. Trapped, uncertain, doubting everything he said and yet wanting so much to believe him too. His eyes crinkled as a ghost smile played across his lips.

‘I think the stars bind us more than we know.’

His whisper made me shiver.

‘And I would have given up a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. Your kind have a feral hunger for survival that my … Pantheonites … have long forgotten.’

‘Kind? Since when did you start getting fussy about a couple of chromosomes?’

His eyelids lowered briefly, but I could see his iris-blues were dulled. It terrified me. I could just about cope with anything but his mental defeat. The void loomed as he stared down at his noble hands, designed for Equite service, not the precipitous North Mountains at the start of the stormy season.

‘We are who we become,’ I added. ‘The only legacy that counts is the one we leave behind.’

‘Unless we happen to be the last guardian of the Book of Arafel,’ he responded with a glint of a smile, ‘then it’s just a simple matter of fulfilling ancient prophecies, and going down in history as the girl who saved the world.’

I rolled my eyes at him, suddenly aware he was moving – getting up and settling back down. Behind me. I stiffened as he reached his arm around me, pulling me tight in a way that said everything. It was the closest we’d been since waking up beside the glass river in the Dead City. And it prompted a river of gold to chase my veins, dazzling and beguiling gold that carried me away from the perilous mountains to a place where pain was a stranger. I mumbled something, unintelligible words, but they lacked any kind of commitment. My body was winning a very short race. Some legacy I was turning out to be.

‘What are you thinking about?’

His whisper made the hairs at the back of my neck stir traitorously.

‘Failure.’

The word danced among the flickering flames.

‘What do you think is going to happen?’

I wasn’t even sure I’d spoken the question aloud.

‘To us?’ he breathed, drawing a finger down my cheek and awakening the elephant moths I’d thought long since flown.

‘To them,’ I amended, when I could trust my voice.

The only sound was the crackling of the scarlet flames we had nursed to life minutes before, before he exhaled raggedly – one breath that told me that he too was holding the world inside.

‘Perhaps, if they’re lucky, the same that happened to us? But they were so …’

I nodded, recalling the slow, agonizing moment Cassius’s arrow had buried itself at the top of Max’s spine, and the strange waxen sheen on Aelia’s skin. I’d known the truth even before Grey arrived. Yet the Oceanids had revived us …?

‘Octavia once told me, the harder the revival, the higher the price.’

I twisted around to find August’s swarthy, windburned face only millimetres away.

His words whispered through me as I stared upwards into the face that had challenged everything since the day we met. He was Octavia’s blueprint, one of her first experiments, destined for the highest office in Isca Pantheon, and yet here he was, lying beside a feral Outsider. Offering what little comfort he could. What alignment of stars had created such an alliance? And were we really free of them in the end?

His military tunic was undone at the neck, revealing honey skin, and the glint of his Equite mark just snaking over the curve of his shoulder. A slow flush crept upwards from my neck that had nothing to do with the fire. How could he make me feel this way, despite everything?

‘Price?’ I repeated.

He nodded, his eyes burning into mine in a way that made the cave recede.

‘For all revivals the Oceanids demand a payment of sorts: either an equitable trade or promise of recompense.’

I swallowed. They’d kept my old slingshot, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant.

‘Then what did I … we …?

‘Promise or give in exchange?’

There was a heavy silence as we both weighed the enormity of the suggestion.

‘I’m not certain … but as the other legends seem to be holding true …’

I struggled for breath. I could feel the dream loosening its hold.

His words conjured up an uncomfortable, distant memory. A dark promise, uttered deep within the depths of the icy waters, yet just as binding as if it were echoed from the top of a sun-drenched mountain.